The Operations Room: A Podcast for COO’s

3. How do you scale from 50 to 500 employees?

Jul 20, 2023

A deep dive into scaling a company from 50 to 500 employees with insights on hiring challenges, breaking silos, and minimizing celebrity status. The importance of processes, leadership development, and accountability in navigating growth. Special guest shares her experiences and strategies for success.

48:13

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Episode guests

Kristen Shannon

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

Successful scaling hinges on identifying key inflection points in company growth for enhanced structures and processes.

Building trust, communication, and strong leadership are essential for scaling success across organizational sizes.

Establishing accountability through effective prioritization and transparent tracking mechanisms fosters a culture of continuous improvement.

Deep dives

Accounting for Organizational Growth: Navigating Challenges Beyond 50 Employees

As organizations scale beyond 50 employees, critical questions around decision-making, communication, and role clarity arise. The threshold point of 50 employees brings complexities like conflicting dynamics between functions, career growth concerns, and policy alignment challenges. Failure to address these issues proactively leads to confusion and conflict.

Introduction

3min

Building Trust Within the Leadership Team for Organizational Scaling Success

2min

The Power of Informal Conversations in Senior Leadership Teams

5min

Insights into Scaling Companies and a Sponsored Break

3min

Navigating Inflection Points in Company Growth

7min

Navigating Silos in a Scaling Organization

28min

In this episode we tackle the question of: How do you scale from 50 to 500 employees?

Our special guest is Kristen Shannon, founder and CEO of Highliner a consultancy that helps high-growth businesses scale across people, systems and processes.

In this episode we get her experiences on the following questions:

What was the lesson in hiring 800 people in one year?
How do you get out of your own way when it comes to structure and process?
What are the scaling inflection points?
How do you fight against the silos that develop in organisations?
What are those hires that you're just like, oh my god, how did we survive without it?
How do you minimise the mini-celebrity status you have as COO in an organisation, where employees massively read things into what you say and do?
How much of your time is spent on rolling out processes versus helping people become better leaders and managing change?
How do you make an organisation more accountable? How do you hold a team to account in an OKR check-in?

Speaker notes and references:

Rocket Fuel - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rocket-Fuel-Essential-Combination-Business/dp/1941631150

Blitzscaling - https://amzn.eu/d/5J6EyBP

Kristen is a results-driven executive with over 10 years of experience in strategy development, operational execution, and organisational scaling. Her career focus has been working in high-pressure companies going through periods of significant and fast-paced growth.

She has worked for ambitious organisations that have doubled in size year on year, leading both recruitment of over 800 FTE a year as well as leading and scaling teams in multiple functional areas.

Kristen is the founder and CEO of Highliner. At Highliner, we are passionate about helping companies design and implement practical, scalable solutions that are the highest leverage to the organisations. We work with companies both on codifying their organisational culture and strategy to support growth as well as auditing and designing the operational systems, processes and tools needed to accomplish their key business objectives at scale. Some of our clients have included iProov (raised £70m growth round), Oxford Ionics (raise £30m Series A), Cisco Meraki (post acquisition) and Sonantic (acquired by Spotify).

https://www.linkedin.com/company/highliner-technology/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristen-shannon/

https://highlinertechnology.com/

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